Horst Köhler

Born in 1943, Horst Köhler studied economics and subsequently worked and graduated at the Institute for Applied Economics in Tübingen.  In 1990, he became Secretary of State in the German Federal Ministry of Finance. In 2000, he moved to Washington, D.C., to take on a position as Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In that position, he campaigned for increased IMF engagement in Africa.

On 23 May 2004, the German Federal Assembly elected Horst Köhler as the 9^th German President of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Köhler primarily committed himself to globalisation efforts with reliable rules and a genuine partnership with the African continent. On 31 May 2010, he resigned from office. In 2012, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, appointed him a member of the ‘High Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda’.

From 2016 to 2017, Horst Köhler and Kofi Annan led a special panel of the African Development Bank, whose function it is to advise the bank on the implementation of its strategies. In August 2017, UN Secretary General António Guterres appointed him ‘Special Envoy to Western Sahara’. He still continues to work as an honorary professor at the University of Tübingen.